I finally got out of the house to see The Last Jedi, after feeling vaguely ill for the last week. Now that I’ve seen it, I can go home and lie in bed like Grandpa Joe for the rest of the year. My thoughts, random observations, and speculation, as follows (there will be SPOILERS):

On the whole, I liked it but I didn’t love it. The pacing felt off, and some of the subplots felt motivated by unnecessary dramatic tension. Like, why does Holdo keep the plan to take shelter in the Crait base secret? And why did Finn and Rose have to sneak off to Canto Bight? Couldn’t that have been some mission they were dispatched on by Leia?

It just seems sort of weird to me that the SuperLeia scene is so divisive. We know she can use the Force, and presumably she’s learned various disciplines from Luke over the decades. Why is being able to fly through space silly, compared to making things float or shooting lightning?

The Canto Bight subplot seems to be the thing that everyone hates on, but I enjoyed it, because it was nice to get away from the Resistance versus First Order stuff, if only for a little while. It felt like Johnson’s attempt to tell a different kind of story in the Star Wars universe, or maybe an homage to the prequels’ aesthetic and sensibilities. We always assume that enormous conflicts are central to the characters in this saga, but for the very rich and the very poor nothing ever changes.

How small is the Resistance, anyway? Did they never have more than a handful of capital ships and a dozen fighters? Is that all that’s left of them on board the Falcon at the end?

How big is the First Order? It seems like Holdo blew up their main fleet at the end, so maybe their plans to invade the Republic’s main systems have hit a snag.

What’s going on in the rest of the galaxy? We assume that the Resistance is the only... uh, resistance to the FO, but there are thousands of systems in the Republic, and presumably lots of planets and organizations with their own defense fleets and infrastructure. It’s pretty much established that the FO is not the size of the Empire, so it seems like a fairly well-organized alliance could easily take them out, especially with their flagship and command fleet obliterated.